In this volume, Barbara Stark examines settlement in the coastal plain
of lowland Mesoamerica, which was richly endowed with fertile soil and
valued tropical resources such as jaguars, cacao, avian species with
bright plumage, and cotton. The book provides basic archaeological data
about regional settlement from three decades of survey research in
south-central Veracruz in the western lower Papaloapan basin, a region
with low density urbanism. The data reveals political and social change,
with consolidation of wealth by elite families during the Late Classic
period. The political analysis considers archaeological evidence related
to several organizational principles: collective versus autocratic,
corporate versus exclusionary/network, and segmentary (unspecialized
versus specialized). Many variables related to these principles used by
other scholars are either suited to historically documented states, not
archaeological ones, or ambiguous. Many published studies either focus
on a particular city or use documents or other evidence drawn from the
top of the settlement hierarchy, characterizing the whole society
politically from a biased sample. This political analysis is regional in
scope and attentive to variation in the settlement hierarchy, providing
a guidepost to analysis of political principles with archaeological
data.
